United States (Hawaii and Puerto Rico)

Why this origin matters

Hawaii and Puerto Rico are worth reading about for reasons that have little to do with volume. Hawaii's crop for 2024-2025 was 4.2 million pounds of green coffee on the federal statistics service's revised estimate, which a state paper puts at about a tenth of one per cent of world production. What makes the two regions instructive is that they grow coffee under United States wages and law. Labour costs far more than in other producing countries; the state of Hawaii regulates what a regional name may mean on a retail bag, down to the percentage; and both were among the last coffee regions in the world to be reached by the berry borer, and Hawaii among the last to be reached by leaf rust. The documents on each are unusually exact, and they do not flatter.

Where coffee grows

In Hawaii, the 2023-2024 crop came from about 1,000 farms on 7,400 bearing acres on five islands, on a state staff paper's account. A 2017 study gives roughly 2,400 hectares in the Kona and Kaʻū districts of Hawaii Island and about 1,400 on Kauai, Oahu, Maui and Molokai together, citing earlier documents; the federal statistics release itself gives no figure by island or district. The state's rules recognise Hamakua, Kaʻū, Kauai, Kona, Maui, Molokai and Oahu as geographic names for green coffee. In Puerto Rico, the 2022 Census of Agriculture counts 2,983 farms growing coffee on 18,961 cuerdas, and divides the island into eight regions named for municipalities: the Utuado and Lares regions between them harvested nearly four fifths of the crop. A 1922 trade history describes the same belt, from the hills behind Ponce north through the centre of the island, and names Utuado, Adjuntas, Lares, Las Marías, Yauco, Maricao, San Sebastián, Mayagüez, Ciales and Ponce as the municipalities with the largest plantations. A state paper says Hawaii is the only state that grows coffee on a commercial scale; CoffeeHQ has read nothing on coffee in California and does not describe it.

One crop, three sizes: cherry, parchment and green

The federal statistics service counts Hawaii's coffee first as cherry, the whole fruit as it is picked. On that basis the 2024-2025 crop was 25.3 million pounds harvested, of which 22.4 million were used, from 7,000 bearing acres. The same release then restates the used crop twice more: 5.26 million pounds as parchment, and 4.2 million pounds as green coffee. All three numbers are the same harvest at different stages, and a reader who meets one of them without its basis can be wrong by a factor of five.

The value changes with the basis too. The release values the 2024-2025 crop at 53 million dollars, which is the cherry at 2.37 dollars a pound. A state paper values the 2023-2024 crop at 67 million dollars, which is the green coffee at 19.50 dollars a pound; the statistics service's own value for that season, on cherry, is 48.2 million. Neither is wrong. They are prices at different points along the chain.

The release is also candid about its own standing. Its figure for the season in progress is a forecast, final estimates follow in May, and the previous season is routinely revised: 2024-2025 was first published as 21.0 million pounds of used cherry and now stands at 22.4 million. The forecast for 2025-2026, made in January 2026, is 17.8 million pounds from 6,500 acres, a fifth down. Its row headed United States repeats Hawaii's figures exactly, which is how one learns that Puerto Rico is not in it.

Puerto Rico, counted once every five years

Puerto Rico's coffee appears in the Census of Agriculture, not in the seasonal release, and in different units: land in cuerdas and the harvest in hundredweight. The table does not say whether the hundredweight is of cherry, parchment or green coffee, and nor does the rest of the census volume, which lists the hundredweight only as a unit and coffee only as a crop whose quantity harvested was collected. CoffeeHQ therefore does not convert it or set it beside Hawaii's figures.

The 2022 census counts 2,983 farms with coffee, 18,961 cuerdas, 20.7 million trees and a harvest of 53,940 hundredweight. The census before it, taken in 2018, the year after the hurricanes, counted 2,292 farms, 13,283 cuerdas and 21,490 hundredweight. The census also separates coffee grown under shade from coffee grown in the open. In 2018 shade accounted for 3,804 cuerdas and open coffee for 9,479; in 2022 the figures were 8,294 and 10,667, so that the area under shade more than doubled between the two counts while the open area grew by about an eighth.

Older figures put those in proportion. The 1922 trade history reports 167,137 acres planted to coffee in the tax year 1915-16, on the insular treasury's figures. A 2017 paper, citing a Puerto Rican source CoffeeHQ did not open, describes the area as having fallen from 77,000 hectares a century earlier to about 14,000 on some 4,500 farms; a 2023 review by several of the same authors gives approximately 5,000 hectares.

Species and varieties

Hawaii's coffee is arabica in every document read. A 2022 study, citing the state agriculture department, calls Kona Typica the prominent variety and lists Caturra, Catuai, Bourbon, SL-28 and Geisha as also grown; the farms surveyed in Kona and Kaʻū in 2016 and 2017 were mostly Kona Typica, red Bourbon and red and yellow Caturra. None of these documents gives a share of the acreage for any variety. In Puerto Rico a 2023 review describes arabica and robusta as both planted, and names Caturra, Catuai and two local selections, Limaní and Frontón. A three-year rust study there sampled eight arabica cultivars: Caturra, Catuai, Bourbon, Mundo Novo and one it calls Variedad Puerto Rico, a type of Typica, as the susceptible ones, and Limaní, Marsellesa and Obatã as the resistant ones. The World Coffee Research catalogue describes Limaní as a cross of a Timor Hybrid line with Villa Sarchi, selected in Puerto Rico by the island's agricultural experiment station, and Frontón as a cross of the Timor Hybrid with Caturra. The catalogue rates both as intermediate in their resistance to rust, although its own history of Limaní says the variety was released to farmers in 1994 after evaluations showed resistance; the rust study, citing the catalogue, places Limaní among the resistant cultivars.

The borer in 2010, the rust in 2020

Isolation kept both regions free of the coffee berry borer long after it had reached almost every other producer. It was detected in Puerto Rico in 2007 and in the Kona district in 2010, and then on Oahu in 2014 and Maui in 2016. A 2023 review says that in the five years after it arrived in Hawaii yields are estimated to have fallen by an average of a fifth, and that infestation in both regions has sometimes passed 85 per cent of berries, which it attributes largely to the cost and shortage of labour for clearing fruit after harvest. The same review also says that monitoring, field practices and a fungal spray have brought a substantial reduction in average infestation in Hawaii over the past decade, with yields and quality rising; that sits awkwardly beside the state paper's falling yield an acre, reported below, and the two are measuring different things over different years. A survey of 214 Puerto Rican farms in 2014 found an average of 20 per cent of berries infested.

Leaf rust reached Puerto Rico in 1989. Hawaii stayed free of it until 2020: the state announced on 30 October that the federal laboratory had confirmed it in samples from Maui and that suspect plants had been found at a house in Hilo. By July 2021 it had been confirmed on every island where coffee is grown commercially. A genetic study found the Hawaiian rust to be of the same genotype as the rust behind the Central American epidemic of 2012, and judged an arrival on plant material or on travellers more likely than one on the wind; its authors are clear that this is the explanation their data fit, not one they have shown. The state had prohibited the import of coffee plants since 1888 and required imported green coffee to be fumigated.

The state's staff paper puts the two together when it explains the decade: yield an acre fell by 27 per cent between 2014 and 2024, which it attributes primarily to the two invaders, and both added spraying and labour to the cost of a crop. Rust matters particularly where the variety is an old one. The prominent variety in Hawaii is a Typica, and the catalogue's entry for Typica rates it susceptible.

Harvest

The months depend on the district, and the documents do not quite agree with themselves. A 2017 study of farms on Hawaii Island gives the harvest as August to December in Kona and September to February in Kaʻū where it describes the farms, and as September to December and September to April where it discusses picking; it explains the longer season in Kaʻū by weather that keeps fruit on the trees for most of the year. A trade history of 1922 put ripening in Kona between September and January, with two principal pickings. For Puerto Rico the only months found are from the same 1922 history: flowering generally in February and March, and harvesting from September into January in about ten pickings. No present-day document read gives Puerto Rico's harvest months.

Picking at United States wages

Both regions pay United States wages for work that elsewhere is the cheapest part of growing coffee. The 2017 study put labour at 12 to 15 dollars an hour in Hawaii and 7.50 to 10 dollars in Puerto Rico, and its authors return to the point throughout: the recommended defence against the berry borer is to pick thoroughly and strip the trees after harvest, and that is the step growers can least afford. When pickers' work was checked on eleven Kona farms in 2016, about seven harvesting rounds in ten left more than ten ripe or overripe berries on a tree.

The farms these studies describe are small. Most of the Kona and Kaʻū farms surveyed were family-owned and between half a hectare and a hectare and a half. The 2023 review says smallholders are most of the growers in both regions, and names an ageing farming population among the reasons management advice is not taken up. The state's paper cites persistent labour shortages as one of the growers' biggest difficulties. None of these documents says who the pickers are, how they are paid or where they come from.

How the coffee is processed

The documents say little about method. The federal statistics service reports Hawaii's crop on a parchment basis as well as on a cherry and a green one and surveys the state's millers, and the 2017 study speaks of wet and dry mills on Hawaii Island farms; none of them describes the steps. Two of the nine grades in the state's table are called Natural Prime and Mixed Natural Prime, and together they were under 2 per cent of the green coffee certified in 2024-2025; the table does not define them. For Puerto Rico the one statement found is from 1922, when a trade history said planters there favoured the wet method. It is recorded as history.

How it is graded and sold

Most of Hawaii's green coffee goes to roasters on the United States mainland, and nobody counts how much: the state's staff paper says figures on movement between Hawaii and the mainland are not available. What is counted is exports to other countries, which are small and have been falling. Green coffee exports were worth 3.7 million dollars in 2024, half their value two years earlier; Japan took about 72 per cent by value in 2022 and about half in 2024, with Canada second. The paper also notes that Hawaii exports more roasted coffee by weight than green, which it says would be impossible without importing green beans to roast, and that its roasted exports sell for a fraction of the price of its green ones because many are blends. The statistics service's price for green coffee was 25.40 dollars a pound in 2024-2025. That is an average price received for a crop of a few million pounds, grown at United States costs; it is not a guide to what coffee earns anywhere else.

What the word Kona is allowed to mean on a label

A bag sold in Hawaii as a Kona blend has, since 1991, been required to contain at least 10 per cent Kona coffee by weight. The state's staff paper tells the history plainly: the name began to command a premium in the 1980s, cheap imported coffee was sold under it, and the 1991 law set the 10 per cent floor for any coffee labelled with a regional name. The paper records the objection that followed, that a buyer of a 10 per cent blend may not realise that nine tenths of it was grown elsewhere, and says the legislature acknowledged in 2007 that the rule degraded the name without then changing it. In 2019 Kona farmers sued distributors and retailers over coffee labelled as Kona.

Two acts then changed the law. Act 211 of 2023, in force from 1 July 2024, extended the rules to ready-to-drink coffee and hotel-room pouches, required a blend's label to list the percentage by weight of coffee from each origin so that the figures add up to 100, and reserved the phrase All Hawaiian for coffee both grown and processed in the state. Act 198 of 2024 raises the minimum: the 10 per cent blend expires on 30 June 2027, and from 1 July 2027 a blend carrying a Hawaiian origin name must contain at least 51 per cent coffee from that origin. A second reading of this entry opened the statute as the department itself publishes it: section 486-120.6 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes in the text in force from 1 July 2024. That text carries the 10 per cent floor, the reservation of All Hawaiian for coffee grown and processed in the state, the list of origins a blend must print after the word Contains, a rule that coffee below the state's grade standard may not use a geographic origin at all, and a history note that begins with a law of 1991. It was published before the amendment made by Act 198, so the 51 per cent rule and its dates are still given here as the department's guideline and its officials' presentation of February 2026 state them; the legislature's own site refused every request for the Act.

The names are tied to grades. Green coffee graded below Prime may not use Hamakua, Kaʻū, Kauai, Kona, Maui, Molokai or Oahu on its label. And the law has limits its own department points out: roasters outside Hawaii may not be bound by the state's blend rules. The staff paper reports growers and processors saying that, since the lawsuits and the new law, some buyers have moved to blends with no Hawaiian coffee in them at all, and that the price of Hawaiian green coffee fell by about a fifth in the 2024-2025 season. It gives that as what the trade told it, without data, and the statistics service's revised average price for green coffee in that season is higher than the season before, so the two accounts do not obviously agree. A federal provision has since been added. Section 778 of the appropriations Act approved on 12 November 2025, Public Law 119-37, says that for the purposes of applying the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, Hawaii grown or produced coffee shall contain at least 51 per cent of coffee grown in Kona, Kaʻū, Maui, Oahu, Kauai or other areas of the state, and that its common or usual name shall be Kona Coffee, Kau Coffee, Maui Coffee, Oahu Coffee, Kauai Coffee or Hawaii Coffee according to where it was grown. That is the whole of the provision. The state officials' presentation dates the enactment a day earlier and reports the Food and Drug Administration as saying the provision needs no regulations to take effect; how it will be applied to blends, and how it sits beside the state's own dates, the one sentence does not say, and CoffeeHQ does not interpret it.

Nine grades, and about half the crop graded

Hawaii grades green coffee into nine classes: Extra Fancy, Fancy, Hawaii No. 1, Select, Prime, Hawaii No. 3, Natural Prime, Mixed Natural Prime and Off Grade. The state's description says grading rests on cleanliness, colour, roasting quality, allowance for defects, bean size and moisture.

Two things in the state's own table cut against the way the top grades are usually talked about. First, certification is voluntary, and in 2024-2025 the state certified about 2.0 million pounds, roughly half of the green coffee the statistics service then estimated. Second, of what was certified, Prime was 72 per cent, Select 13 per cent and Hawaii No. 3 about 8 per cent. Extra Fancy, Fancy and Hawaii No. 1 together came to under 5 per cent. The grade most Hawaiian coffee carries is the lowest one that may still use a regional name.

History

Coffee reached Hawaii in the early nineteenth century. A 2022 paper says it was first brought in 1817 and failed, that plants came from Brazil in 1825, and that the first commercial plantation was started at Koloa on Kauai eleven years after that. A trade history of 1922 gives the same 1825 and Brazil, mentions a story that the navigator Vancouver had brought seed in the 1790s without endorsing it, and says the first official record of a crop, in 1845, was 248 pounds. Its account of the next seventy years is of repeated reversals: a blight in 1855 and 1856 after which many plantations went over to sugar cane; a depression after the United States took the islands in 1898, which it puts down to the loss of a protective tariff; and a recovery after 1912. By then, it says, about four fifths of the islands' coffee came from Kona, and many of the plantations were cultivated by Japanese labour. Puerto Rico's coffee is older. The same history dates it to 1755 or earlier, introduced from Martinique and Haiti, and has production between 30 and 50 million pounds a year from 1881, with a record of 62.6 million pounds in 1896. It says a storm in 1900 did great damage and that the island's main customer was not the United States, which never took to the coffee, but Cuba: of nearly 30 million pounds exported in 1921, about 21 million went there.

What Hurricane Maria did to twenty-eight farms

Hurricane Maria crossed Puerto Rico on 20 September 2017, in the weeks when coffee was ripening. A team that had surveyed coffee farms in the central-western mountains in 2013 went back to 28 of them. The farms had lost, on average, 37.5 per cent of their canopy, from about 40 per cent cover to about 25. All ten farmers interviewed reported the complete loss of the fruit then on the trees, severe damage to the coffee bushes, and damage to almost every other crop. They expected to harvest in 2018 less than a fifth of what the same farms had averaged between 2010 and 2012.

The study went looking for a pattern and reports that it did not find the one it expected. Its authors had supposed that farms with more shade trees would be better protected. Canopy lost bore no relation to canopy held before the storm. Farms that had spent more on inputs lost less, but when the authors separated the inputs the whole effect came from fertiliser, and they conclude that no general statement about intensity of management can be made. Their summary is that management style had only a small effect on how farms withstood the storm, likely, they say, because the storm was so strong.

Estimates for the island as a whole are of a different quality. A 2017 paper, written weeks after the storm, repeats a preliminary estimate that 80 per cent of commercial coffee plantations and 90 per cent of the infrastructure had been destroyed. The 2023 review gives the value of Puerto Rico's green coffee in 2018 as 4.8 million dollars, 86 per cent less than six years before, mostly on account of the 2017 hurricanes. The census, which is a count and not an estimate, shows the harvest at 21,490 hundredweight in 2018 and 53,940 in 2022, and the 2023 review says recurring hurricane damage is one reason Puerto Rican farmers rarely manage the berry borer at all.

Pressures on the sector

• Hurricanes in Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria made landfall on 20 September 2017 as a category 4 storm; a study of 28 coffee farms measured an average loss of 37.5 per cent of their canopy, and all ten farmers it interviewed reported losing the whole of the crop then ripening.
• Pests and diseases that arrived late. The coffee berry borer was detected in Puerto Rico in 2007 and in Hawaii in 2010; leaf rust was found in Puerto Rico in 1989 and in Hawaii in October 2020.
• Hawaii's agriculture department lists climate change, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, droughts and hurricanes among the hazards to coffee there, without measuring any of them.
• Labour. United States wages make thorough picking and post-harvest sanitation, the main defences against the berry borer, the steps growers can least afford.
• Two invasive pests in a decade in Hawaii, and yield an acre down by 27 per cent between 2014 and 2024 on the state's figures.
• A labelling law in transition. The minimum for a blend rises from 10 to 51 per cent in July 2027, and the state's own paper reports buyers leaving Hawaiian coffee out of blends altogether.
• A shrinking area in Hawaii: bearing acreage fell from 7,400 to 6,500 across the three seasons in the January 2026 release.
• In Puerto Rico, recovery from the 2017 hurricanes, counted only every five years.

The hurricane figures are from one study of 28 farms and are not an estimate for the island. The list of hazards in Hawaii is a state staff paper's, given without data.

Institutions worth knowing

• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service — surveys Hawaii's growers and millers twice a year and publishes the seasonal coffee release; runs the five-yearly Census of Agriculture that counts Puerto Rico's coffee
• Hawaiʻi Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity — its Commodities Branch inspects and certifies green coffee, and its Measurement Standards Branch enforces the labelling law
• USDA Agricultural Research Service — its laboratory in Hilo and its Tropical Agriculture Research Station in Mayagüez appear as authors of the pest and disease studies read for this entry
• University of Hawaiʻi Cooperative Extension Service — named in those studies as the body that trains growers and pickers

Explore United States (Hawaii and Puerto Rico)'s coffee from here

A reading order, not a list of everything related: each step picks up something this page raised and takes it further.

1. Step 1TypicaThe old variety behind the Kona Typica that Hawaii's documents call prominent, and why it is exposed to rust.
2. Step 2Coffee pests and diseasesWhat the berry borer and leaf rust do to a tree, which is the story of Hawaii's last fifteen years.
3. Step 3SarchimorThe group Puerto Rico's Limaní belongs to: a Timor Hybrid line crossed with Villa Sarchi for rust resistance.
4. Step 4Timor HybridThe natural cross that both of Puerto Rico's local selections descend from on one side.
5. Step 5BrazilWhere Hawaii's first successful plants came from in 1825, and what a regional name legally means there.
6. Step 6GuatemalaA Central American producer still replanting after the rust epidemic whose genotype the Hawaiian rust shares.
7. Step 7Tasting LabTaste a single-origin coffee beside a blend that names the same place, and record what differs for yourself.